Love Stories: The Discourses of Desire in Literature and Culture, 1800 – the Present Session Two

Agenda  Summary of Session One  Theorising and historicising desire: Catherine Belsey  Tennyson, ”The Lady of Shalott”

Happy Valentine’s Day !!!  “For this was on seynt Volantynys day / Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.” (Parlement of Foules)  "Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day." (Hamlet)  ” […] So now you're gone / And I was wrong / I never knew what it was like/ To be alone […]” (Linkin Park ”Valentine’s Day”)

Love is a quotation  ”Every other night on TV someone says ’I love you’” (Rolan Barthes)  Postmodern declarations of love: ”I love you as they say in the movies” (Umberto Eco)

A Summary of Session One : John Keats’ ”To Fanny Brawne” ”You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour – for what is in the world? I say you cannot conceive; it is impossible you should look with such eyes upon me as I have upon you: it cannot be” (NE2 : 900/ 952)

A Summary of Session One Love = the desire or longing for merging or uniting with an other,  But union and fusion = death, i.e. the end of longing,  So merging, uniting and fusing with the other is staged as an impossibility

A Summary of Session One  Love is the love of love  Love concerns that which threatens or prevents love: physical, social, pyschological obstacles

A Summary of Session One ”La Belle Dame Sans Merci”  The knight and the elfish lady: love is magic (enthralment, enrapture, captivation, fascination, charm)  The narrator and the knight-but-not-quite  The reader and Keat’s odd poem (ballad metre and frame structure)

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Reader ( )

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard ( )

Theorising Desire – According to Catherine Belsey. ”Reading Love Stories” Two key assumptions of romance:  Human beings are divided into mind and body  Human beings are incomplete until united with their soul mates

Theorising Desire – According to Catherine Belsey. ”Reading Love Stories” (cont.)  In romances ”true love offers to unify mind and body” (23)  However, romances celebrate ”the elemental otherness of desire as a constituent of true love” (28) in metaphors of the destruction of subjectivity [remember Keats!]  ”True love, then, is not so much a union of mind and body as an alternation of their dominance” (30)

Belsey, ”Adultery in King Arthur’s Court” Arthurian legend: Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Elaine, Mark, Tristam, Iseult, etc.  Stories of adultery and homosocial desire: triangular desire - rivalry

Belsey, ”Adultery in King Arthur’s Court” The literary and cultural history of Arthurian legend:  I: the 12th Century romance. ”Love is passionate, extravagant, agonizing, and obsessional” (108). Love is not related to marriage and family  II. The 15th Century romance. Adultery is tolerated.  III. 19th century romance. Adultery in conflict with moral and spiritual (religious) duty

Romances in the 21st century: King Arthur (2004), Tristan and Iseult (2006)

Tennyson, ”The Lady of Shalott”  Summarise the poem. Find headings for each of the four sections. What’s her situation like? Why does it change?  Pay particular attention to the following: the lady, Camelot, weaving.  What’s the theme of the poem?

John William Waterhouse 1888

John William Waterhouse, 1894

John William Waterhouse, 1916 ”’I Am Half Sick of Shadows’”, Said The Lady of Shalott”

William Holman Hunt

John Sidney Meteyard

Arthur Huges

William More Egley

John Atkinson Grimshaw